7 Ways to Optimize Your Blog
Every half second, a new blog appears on the Internet. With 175,000 being created every day and the blogosphere doubling in size every six months, the standards for a quality weblog have become much higher. Here are 7 ways to optimize yours:
1. Spend Time on Appearance
If you study Technorati's list of most popular blogs, you'll see that each has a unique and trademark design. None of them use the default template that ships with Wordpress or MovableType. The appearance of your blog says a lot about it, so either spend time developing the design yourself or have a talented designer craft a distinct look for it. Good content and good design should always go hand in hand. Additionally, different browsers behave differently, so make sure your design has cross-browser compatibility. An easy way to ensure this is to validate your website using the Markup Validation Service provided by W3C.
2. Focus on Information Design
Quality content is not always effective content. Teachers and professors are not the only people who appreciate clear organization and orderly formatting. Make it as easy as possible for your readers to absorb the material you're providing, and they'll be thankful that you took the time to organize your words and thoughts. Long entries are always easier to follow when they are broken into smaller paragraphs and sections with proper formatting. Images go well with words. Neatness counts.
3. Keep Things Futureproof and Scalable
Scalability is not mentioned much in blogging, but it is important to keep in mind. Develop and design everything as if your blog already has years of content and millions of readers. Minimize the size of your entries. This might not make much of a difference under normal conditions, but if you ever experience a sudden explosion in traffic, your server will be more likely to hold up under the strain. For futureproofing, use CSS whenever you can instead of hardcoding formatting directly into your entry HTML. This allows you to make formatting changes globally across all your blog's entries. By planning carefully for the future, you can avoid making irreversible mistakes in the present.
4. Standardize Everything Possible
Develop your own standards for everything on your blog, and stick to them. An entry you publish years later should be very similar in design, topic, and formatting to what you post today. Therefore, think and plan carefully about everything you choose to do. Be consistent in how often you post, how you format your entry titles, and what you post about. Everyone loves and appreciates neatness, so be systematic and standardize every aspect of your blog.
5. Streamline the Posting Process
The amount of time it takes you to write and publish entries might not seem significant when you start out, but it accumulates as the days, months, and years go by. Making the posting process as simple and efficient as possible helps you in post consistently while letting you focus your time, energy, and brainpower on the content itself. If you have programming knowledge, write software modifications and custom scripts that help you shrink repetitive chores into the fewest number of clicks and keystrokes. Look for any tedious, recurring tasks, and find ways to minimize the time it takes to accomplish them. If you don't have the programming knowledge necessary to write custom scripts, standardize your entries with a minimalistic mindset.
6. Keep Things Simple
Follow the example Google set in designing their homepage by thinking of each pixel on your blog as prime real estate. If there isn't a good reason that something should be added to your page, there's probably many reasons to leave it off. Thinking carefully about what you add to your blog helps you ensure fast load times and uncluttered pages.
7. Put Your Readers Above Yourself
While everyone seems to be preaching tips on how to maximize advertising income from your blog, it's easy to forget the fact that people visit your blog to read it. Sure, placing contextual advertising directly into your content could drastically improve your daily clickthrough rate, but content is best when read by the readers, not milked by the owners. Blogging is a mutual, symbiotic relationship between bloggers and readers, so don't sacrifice long term results for short term gain.
Comments
Good Tips man!
God bless,
-en3r0
These lists are geting very popular :)
Very nice blog entry!
These are all very good tips! #5 is an especially great. Thanks for info.
Great list there Michael. I think as the Internet is increasingly being seen as a respected and vital information resource by many gen-x/y users and others, such tips are important. Implicitly picked up on by surfers, they act as a marker of professionalism, indicating a degree of credibility.
Your blog has a very nice design, especially the layout... did you design it yourself?
Anyway, good article dude.. keep it up.
Thank You. I am new to blogging. However, I am a programmer/ teacher. I do not want to overload my blog page. Additionally, I found out that making drastic changes can cause hours of debugging.
I tried to copy embeded code ( music) to my page. It knocked out some html code. It took me 2 hours to find the { that was missing.
K.
Thanks for the tips. I just started blogging this year and my blog covers, basically, all topics. It's a personal blog and trying to keep all the posts across the wildly different topics has been challenging.
Nice tips, thanks. I will be using them for my teaching English in Korea blog. :)
Good post.
Thanks
Plessed be the child that bringeth the blog money and traffic.
thanks for the tips
Nice list.
It is good to see entry #7 in there.
You have to provide people with a reason to return to your blog time and time again. If the content isn't informative or entertaining enough to keep them coming back, your blog is doomed.
A one-time surge of traffic means nothing if you can't convert those visitors to subscribers/readers.
Keep up the good work.
Very helpful!
Thanks for the recommendations. Good suggestions.
thank you very much,it's helpful for me
Thoughtful recommendations :) But, does a unique design cut the ice all the time? I've seen some blogs at google's blogger which had the same old blogger template, but still managed to attract huge amount of readers. I tried to give my blog ( http://atunu.blogspot.com ) as unique a look as I can try with my limited knowledge of coding and markup, but still the design doesn't seem to create that much awe. I think the exclusive-ness and gravity of the content count a lot more + a good publicity adds some juice to it too .
I have been trying to use my blog to bring in some traffic and revenue, but I guess I am not doing good enough. Furthermore, I have more than just one, so I should be getting traffic, isn't it?
Great tips - thanks.
About the design - I would recommend that you find a professional to do the design rather than you do it yourself. Unless, of course, you are a designer.
These tips are outstanding no matter what type of blog you have. IMO, a must read for every blogger. Well done.
Informative list, thanks for sharing.
Good points.
Great advice. I will go back over my site and re-evaluate. One of the main issues is the way a browser renders the page. This has an impact on appearance that's outside my control. Mine is great in firefox but no so good in Explorer.
Thank you.Nice and useful tips.
And your design isn't that bad i guess.
Simple Is Smart..
and this simple,even,is quite a treat to eyes.
I wonder if design actually matters at all anymore.
Over half my readers now get my content via RSS readers and I know a lot of bloggers (as well as media and news sites) that are seeing the same thing. As an RSS user myself, I quite honestly couldn't tell you what the vast majority of the 75 sites I subscribe to look like and have, on ocassion, clicked thorugh to find that they'd undergone major redesigns since I last visited.
I think it's better to focus on great content, even if that means abandoning all attempts at good design and planting a nice big "subscribe" button at the top.
Thank you for these good tips. They are more than welcome.
I like your design, especially the numbers in the comments. Good work.
Greetings from the Netherlands.
Nice, list. I think I'm going to do a revision of my own blog based on your article. Keep up the good work.
This guy just republished your full post
http://instabloke.blogspot.com/2006/10/7-ways-to-optimizing-your-blog.html
Nice Tips. I translated this into Japanese. Thanks!
Greeting from Canada!
Good post!!
8) Post a list of old, common-sense tips on how to make your blog a success
and submit it to delicious.
Well, you hit the proverbial nail. I really appreciate #5. I am just starting out and keeping a long term perspective. I want to grow but remain 'me'. This article will definitely help me to produce better blogs as I begin. Thanks.
Roger,
Thanks for showing us.
I think I will quote you on my blog. Thanks. "Blogging is a mutual, symbiotic relationship between bloggers and readers, so don't sacrifice long term results for short term gain." I will also add your url to del.icio.us. I've been experimenting with using free internet tools such as Swicki, Flickr, frimr, thinkfree, Gather and Digg. They each offer something unique. While del.icio.us is probably the one that I use most, Swicki offers some unique features for finding content-relevant sites. Folksonomy is a cumbersome but brilliant word in terms of search engines. Its authentic use implies that the author is contributing to the content/connectivity conversation. Thanks for these tips. I wish I knew CSS. For now I can only hardcode with html.
Small is more . Select a niche and stick to it rather than spreading horizontally spread vertically . Havining an unique product or a service blog and trying to be an authority in your industry brings you the best results . Word of mouth spreads more rapidly in blogging industry. be interactive with your audiences and post them back once they have commented . Do to your visitors as you do them in real life . They will be coming back more to your blog giving you more returning visitors -the ultimate test of Brand Loyalty
Helpful tips ... always write for the reader.
Your tips are very helpful for anyone who is new to blogging. I, myself is new to blogging. I m sure to follow your tips so that i can increase my no. of visitors.Plz do visit my blog & give me some suggestion on how to improve it.
Thank You!
Hey,
I love what you'e doing!
Don't ever change and best of luck.
Raymon W.
very smart =)
I agree with Sean, in post 35, that you have to stick to a niche. I started a blog in October 2007 to complement my online travel business with promotes less well known destinations in Europe. My blog has more then doubled the number of site visitors and bookings in under 7 months. Blogs are a very good marketing tool for a small business. I think that the fact that I had already written guides and articles for my website meant that I had resource on which to draw when I started my blog.
This one makes sence "One's first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything - and one's last is to come to terms with everything."